Do you know who are the main competitors of your website? Have you asked yourself how do you find them? Ask no more, because I am going to show you how to easily identify your competitors, and what you can learn from their strategy.

Sometimes a simple search on Google, will be enough. But, there are cases when finding your competitors it’s a more complicated process. What do I mean? Well, let’s pretend that you have a new startup or a small online business with a low budget. It will be almost impossible to compete against the industry giants, who spend millions of dollars on advertising or marketing campaigns.

In this article, I will show you how I can find the small businesses and individuals that compete for the keywords related to “real estate agent”, in Georgia, USA. You can apply the same techniques to find the competitors in your niche.

How to start

First thing is first. Think about all the keywords that define your business best. Create a list, and check the results in Google.

For this example, I will search for the first results for the keyword “Real estate agent in Georgia”

All the results on the first page are from huge businesses, and it’s almost impossible to compete against them, as an individual or a small online business. Websites like Zillow, Realtor or Yellow Pages, can’t even be called competitors, for a small business. They are playing in a different league. If this is the case for your website, don’t give up, because there is still room to grow your business.

Alternatives to find your main competitors

1. Analyze the websites that rank first

Even if the chances for ranking on the first page for your main keyword are not in your favor, you can still find some good resources from the current results. On the first position (Zillow), I can find a directory of real estate agents from Atlanta, Georgia.

Over 20.000 agents are listed on Zillow, and if you are looking to find a competitor, this may be the right place for you. Sort the listings by their recent sales and look for their websites. I will be looking for Rhonda Duffy’s website.

On the right side, I can find my first competitor’s website. Being one of the most popular real estate agents in Georgia, Rhonda is one of the competitors I should follow. Now, I will go back to the directory and look for other competitors. I’ll show you what you can learn from them, later on this article. Repeat the process for the most important agents listed on Zillow, then move to Yellow Pages, or other websites that rank first in Google.

2. Check for alternative keywords

Going back to our initial search on Google, I can determine some alternative keywords suggested by Google, at the bottom of the page.

These are some long tail keywords related to your search, that you should consider for your SEO campaign.

3. Check for blogs in your niche

To find the most popular blogs in the real estate industry, I will use the Google Blog Search. Typing the same search query as I did on Google, I get the following results:

Another way to find blogs in any niche is to browse the Technorati directory. Here you can find thousands of blogs listed by authority.

Browse for the most relevant and authoritative blogs, and select the very best ones.

How to spy on your competition

After identifying the most important competitors from your niche, you will have to analyze their SEO strategy. This can be a time consuming process without using the right tool. Luckily, Monitor Backlinks can help you. This is how you can spy any competitor.

1. Login to Monitor Backlinks, and connect with your Google Analytics account. You will have to add your most important and relevant competitors.

2. Finalize the setup, and that’s it! Monitor Backlinks will automatically crawl for your competitors backlinks and will send their new links to your email inbox. It’s as simple as that. It takes no more than two minutes to get started.

What you can do with your competitor’s backlinks

Now that you are up to date with the backlinks earned by your competitors, you can try to replicate the same links and use this to your advantage. Whether they are building backlinks for SEO or their website was mentioned on important websites, building the same links will help you get the same exposure and eventually higher rankings in search engines.

Let me show you some examples, along with the actions to take:

A real estate competitor has listed his website on a new directory – I can easily list my own business, on the same directory, and be one step ahead of the others.

My competitor is promoting his website using guest posts on reputable websites – By knowing this; I can become a contributor, and get an important link.

If your competitor is doing press releases, you can do the same.

When your competitor is being mentioned on the most popular news websites, you can try replicate the links.

If you are serious about having a successful business, you have to spy your competition. Whether you like it or not, they are there, are they are doing everything possible to steal your clients. Everybody spies competitors, from large corporations to small business. You should too; otherwise it’s a missed opportunity to grow your client database.

Conclusion

Spying your competitors will help you find endless opportunities to promote your website across the community in your niche. If you haven’t yet identified your main competitors, follow the steps I have listed above. Don’t have a Monitor Backlinks account yet? Try the 30 days free trial.

Written By

I am an inbound marketer. I enjoy doing SEO and recovering websites from Google penalties. I also do social media, conversion rate optimization and more.
You can connect with me on Twitter or Google Plus.

Comments

4 Comments

Amazing Post , am very Impressed Moreover monitor back-links is the best in the market. I tested it By adding a back link to a friends website and within 22 hrs it found the link. I was shocked. because Normally the other ones i have been investing in, my links show up in like a week or so. thank you Felix for the Article.

Hi Felix, simple but niche topic. We know that SEO is now harder and we need to think more about it. Sometime, a big company has a good online marketing team and we know that. So, if we want to optimize or site as same as the big competitor, then your idea is a great shortcut to success. Thank you bro.